Banking on better IT solutions

For Cosmos Bank, internal cloud was not only about cost savings but also about an increase in efficiency, says Vasant Manwadkar, the bank's IT head

The Cosmos Co-Operative Bank Ltd is based in Pune and is one of the second largest and oldest urban cooperative banks in India established in 1906. This bank is relentlessly working towards innovation and making its services and functions more robust to serve its customers better.

A year ago, the bank had implemented server virtualization by consolidating their multiple independent servers, several of them were either candidate for upgrade or replacement. “With power costs going through the roof, running them efficiently was proving to be expensive,” reveals Vasant Manwadkar, Head, IT of Cosmos Bank.

This server virtualization helped the bank to consolidate all these servers reducing the manpower cost, AMCs and several of the licenses. Not just that, having multiple physical servers also meant dedicating to them a lot of space, something that is always at a premium for an enterprise.

That is when the bank decided to do something about the rising IT costs. “We convinced the management that for the same money that we pay for the AMCs and the upgrade cost, we could bring in an altogether new system,” says Manwadkar. The management was supportive and the move was sanctioned.

Today the bank has multiple virtual servers, which houses all applications excluding the core banking solutions. The internal cloud is within the network and is protected against external threats. The bank has not only saved a lot on energy costs, but will cover the cost of virtualisation in the next three years. Scalability is much easier and faster, since everything is now virtual.

But Manwadkar feels that the finance industry still needs more support and trust from the IT industry where cloud computing is concerned.

“It may not be matured enough in India because of the network and data security risks. We are still not very confident of an external cloud” he says.

Manwadkar also feels that cloud computing as a concept is coming up in India and that very few companies here are using it as compared to the high rate in the developed countries because IT infrastructure in India is still a big challenge. “Cloud needs reliable connectivity and power, a big issue for us in India especially in rural areas. He also rues the fact that law and order here leaves a lot to be desired since redressal in such cases is not speedy.

“And because the concept is still not too popular in India, is cost advantage is not every great – the OPEX and CAPEX seem to be the same and one wonders why invest in it, unlike developed countries where because of mass usage, the cost is relatively low,” Manwadkar reveals.